


Spiral

by story_monger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel True Forms, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 21:02:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6129969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stuck in a cabin in a hurricane, and Sam is thinking about angels.</p><p>Companion to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6129976">All the Glory</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Spiral

If Sam hadn’t seen his own hands slice off the havsrå’s head a few hours ago, he’d wonder if the rain pounding against the cabin’s roof was her doing. The cabin—an old, abandoned thing someone, once upon a time, used during hunting trips—is close enough to the South Carolina coast that an angry havsrå could grasp for them. But she’s washed-out ashes, now.

Sam sits on the mildewed couch, elbows braced on his knees, leaning toward the cranky old radio on the table. He pieces together the snatches of words the antennae can collect.

“They’ve upped it to category four hurricane,” Sam announces when the door slams open and Dean ducks in, dripping.

“Seriously?” Dean shucks the yellowed-clear plastic poncho and dumps it in a corner. “I just took a look at the road. Pretty much flooded.”

He’s too magnanimous saying it. Sam pulls at his mouth and swallows the words crowding at the back of his throat. If they’d left right after taking care of the havsrå they’d be well inland by now.

“Hey come on, it’ll be fine,” Dean says. He crosses the room to the kitchenette and pops open the green cooler. “We’re on a high hill; the water won’t reach us. We’ll be fine.”

Sam watches Dean’s broad back and considers saying it’s not the water he’s thinking about. Dean straightens and turns around right as the wind shifts key, climbing higher. Sam can feel where it sneaks through the wall’s chinks. Dean grins like it’s the best thing to happen to him tonight. Sam stands; his knees jostle the table and make the radio grumble. He makes a show of checking his watch—9 p.m.

“I’m going to bed,” he says. “Wake me up if the roof comes off.” Dean leans back and belly laughs. Sam hurries to the back room.

He should be glad Dean’s in a good mood. But it’s Dean, so there’s less of a chance that he actually feels better and more of a chance that this is his newest method of dodging hell memories. Sam doesn’t bring up his brother’s stint in hell as a rule, but he does pray. If the angels have a vested interest in bringing his brother back to life, he figures, they might acquiesce to Sam’s requests to help him. Maybe the one angel, Castiel, will come to ease Dean’s mental scars, and Sam will get to see an angel again. Maybe if Sam stands near him, his grace will sear out the thing inside Sam. Maybe. Sam keeps praying.

The rain is louder in the back room; it whips against the window and roof in thunderous applause. Sam flicks on the lantern and moves to the bed still scattered with case research. He picks up a printout with a picture of a woman sitting on a rock at sea. She faces away; her back is hollowed.

It had been one of those cases that could be pinned on anything: local sailors and fishermen disappearing along the coast, often from the decks of their ships. The ocean is full of hungry, nasty fuckers. They sifted through ghost ships, sea monsters, sirens, before they realized that a large percentage of the town is descended from Scandinavian immigrants. That had tipped Sam off to the creature described on the printout: the havsrå. A guardian of the sea, similar to the wider understood mermaid save for the holes in their backs, known to be helpful when people are polite to it and wrathful when they aren’t. This one had been pissed off for a long time.

Sam gathers up the papers and carries them to the pitted desk. Then he shucks his boots, sprawls on top of the musty bedsheets, and tucks his face into his crossed arms. The storm howls around him.

He dreams about crouching behind scattered boulders and peering out to a figure sitting on one of the rocks. She is the picture on the printout with long, sodden dark hair, facing away from Sam. Her vertebrae drip down her neck like pearls that plunge into a shadowed hollow eating into her torso. Like someone scooped everything out and forgot to replace it. When Sam is grappling with her seconds later, his hand curls around the edge of the hollow, and his fingers become moist and cold. He inhales hard enough to breath in water; he swings the machete. The blade is halfway through the neck when Sam realizes it’s the angel.

Sam wakes up on his back, to darkness and screeching wind. He doesn’t move for a long while, then lifts his hands and wipes them down his face. He rolls off the bed and feels his way toward the main room.

Dean is sprawled on the couch, open-mouthed, snoring, but the wind and rain drown him out. Beer bottles cluster on the countertop. The poncho has been draped on the back of a kitchen chair. Sam follows the progress of Dean’s chest rising and falling then moves across the room so he can sink onto the edge of the couch, near Dean’s hip. He places a flat hand on the place where Dean’s ribs swoop up to his sternum. Sam feels lungs unfurl and shrink back. Dean hums.

Sam checks the time and curses. His clock must have gotten soaked today and broken; it says 9:15 p.m.

The silence cuts in like a freight train. Sam jerks his head up, his hand still against Dean’s chest, and realizes the eye of the hurricane has reached the cabin. In the absence of wind, the cabin groans deep in its foundations, draws the noise out like a dying animal.

The door knocks. Sam drags his hand from Dean’s chest, oozes to a stand with his shoulders set in a straight line. He slogs to the window beside the door, leans down to fumble at the machete. All this should take a few moments. It feels like minutes. He’s like in a dream still, the ones where you go nowhere while running as fast as you can. The air has become pitch; he has to fight through it to move aside the curtain and peer out. He almost laughs when he recognizes the large coat. The laugh doesn’t have the momentum to leave his vocal cords; it hovers in his throat.

Castiel is dry when he steps into the cabin. Sam sets the machete against the wall.

“Hi. Castiel. Hey,” he says. His voice sounds phlegmy and deeper than he expects. “Sorry. I thought. You might be. Something. Else.”

Castiel takes a few steps into the cabin; the cabin’s groans lengthen into frequencies too large and deep to hear. The floor shifts to pool around Castiel’s practical black dress shoes. Castiel surveys the damp space, his eyes lingering on Dean’s shape.

“I’ve been told to not appear in rooms anymore,” he says. His voice is cold; it cuts through the air like a whip. “I have to use doors.”

“Ye—ah,” Sam says.

“I’m here to clean up your brother’s mess,” Castiel says. Sam fixes on his lips. They’re so fast, they blur. “Tell him I won’t report this if he doesn’t do it again.”

A stretching, falling sensation has grabbed the pit of Sam’s stomach and made him want to lean back to compensate. His eyelashes struggle through the air to blink.

“You. Ma-ad?” Sam breathes. The words take weeks to drip from him. They hang in long strands with bulbous, shining ends.

“Yes. Very.”

“Ca-as-ti-el,” Sam heaves. “I-I’m. Drea-aming?”

Castiel focuses on Sam, and Sam can see it. The air around Castiel is warped as a funhouse mirror. The floor ripples around his feet like a whirlpool. The roof divots over his head.

“No,” Castiel says. “No, I apologize. I’m still learning how to…everything here is small.” He glances toward the window, where the rain has become gel against the glass. “Uriel warned me about traveling near warm coasts. I should have remembered.” His eyes narrow, and he turns to Sam. “I will remember next time.”

Sam wants to reply, but his lungs have stopped working. He’s caught in the whirlpool, now. A slow, splendid topple.

Castiel is a blur. His face is in four places at once. He’s growing larger, and Sam can see it, he can see the dark mass clicking and spinning with a ring of light draining toward it and expulsions like wings and a dark center that swallows then regurgitates then swallows the brightest thing Sam has seen, and the whole massive, consuming body shoves its fingers into Jimmy Novak’s hollowed back to play him like a violin. What a wonderful act, what a talent. Glory, gory halleluiah—

The dusty floor bites into Sam’s cheek. His eyelashes brush against the unpolished wood.

The rain is back to its steady hammering, getting the job done. Sam feels for the floor, pushes his upper body up. His watch pulses from his wrist. 9:16 p.m.

Something sick and heavy is living in the back of his skull, curled up in the curve of it. Sam eases to a stand. He looks over the dim room; there are the stationed beer bottles, there is the brother with his whistling snore, there is the door hanging ajar. Sam shuffles to it and peers outside.

The sky is sick and yellow, but the rain is abated and the wind is only aggressive enough to jostle the trees instead of trying to tear them out. Sam suspects, suddenly, that if he turned on the radio, it would tell him the hurricane system is already dissipating. Sam steps out and tilts his head toward the sky, squinting through the cold drops.

Demons cause inexplicable lightning storms. Natural progression.

Sam ducks back into the cabin with a spasm of realization and grabs the first likely container from the kitchenette: a cast iron skillet. He pounds into the muddy grass around the cabin, the skillet held out. It collects a small pool almost immediately. A divot in the earth has formed a puddle of muddy rainwater. Sam sets down the skillet and plunges his knees into the mud, reaching out to scoop up the water in a cupped hand. He thrusts the hand to his mouth; he swallows. It’s cold and silty; he imagines it heavy with isotopes of grace. He bends over the puddle, scooping water into his mouth, caught in a steady frenzy. He does it until his stomach aches; he bends down to thrust his face into the water and keeps drinking.

He doesn’t care about hollow backs and clicking masses. Maybe he can drown the thing inside him. Maybe he can waterwarp his innards to slow it into oblivion. Maybe. Maybe. He has to hope. Maybe.


End file.
